Saturday, December 24, 2016

The war on terror makes a sudden, terrifying appearance in smalltown Norway.

The shooting of a Moroccan waiter is Lillehammer's first murder in years. Detective Inge Olsen relishes the challenge but quickly finds herself out of her depth. This isn't a random racist attack or the response of a jealous husband, it's the work of the most ruthlessly efficient state security organisation in the world.

Inspired by real events that took place in the wake of the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, One Night in Lillehammer constructs an intense crime story set in the short, violent Norwegian summer of 1973.

An original mystery drama featuring documentary interviews. In October 2014, reports of a suspected Russian submarine in the Swedish archipelago sparked an international hunt. Lucas Almquist disappeared at that time.

Now, two years later, Lucas's sister Lina sets out to find him, and discover the truth about the mystery submarines. Along the way, she meets a retired naval commander and an expert in Unidentified Submerged Objects.

Friday, December 23, 2016

A brilliantly twisty, 80-page novella from the No. 1 bestselling author of the Logan McRae series. Including an extract from his new Logan novel, THE MISSING AND THE DEAD.It’s the night of the big Referendum, and all Acting Detective Inspector Logan McRae has to do is find a missing ‘No’ campaigner. Should be easy enough…But, as usual, DCI Steel has plans of her own. As the votes are counted there’s trouble brewing in the pubs and on the streets of Aberdeen.Logan’s picked up a promising lead, but all is not quite what it seems, and things are about to go very, very wrong…

A short story featuring Giordano Bruno: heretic, philosopher and spy. Perfect for fans of C.J. Sansom. Even the dead have a story to tell… Naples, 1566. During a sweltering summer, eighteen-year-old Giordano Bruno takes his final vows at San Domenico Maggiore and is admitted to the Dominican Order – despite doubts over his tendency to ask difficult questions. Assisting in the infirmary, Bruno witnesses an illicit autopsy performed on the body of a young woman. Her corpse reveals a dark secret, and Bruno suspects that hers may not have been an accidental death. His investigation leads him to a powerful figure who wants to keep the truth buried – and Bruno is forced to make a choice between his future in the Order, and justice for an innocent victim and her grieving family…

Days before their wedding, during their last separate nights of hard-partying singledom, Emma Holden's fiance has gone missing. Not only has Dan disappeared without a trace, his brother is found beaten and left for dead, and may not wake up from a coma. Without any evidence, suspicion for the attempted murder falls on Dan - but Emma refuses to believe his guilt. When crime scene photos get splashed across the pages of London tabloids, Emma knows that someone is following her. Watching her. It is an old, familiar feeling, though no less terrifying. A long-hidden family secret seems to unite Emma's troubled past with her dangerous present. As time runs out her trust in her family, her friends -- and Dan -- faces an ultimate test.

Thursday, December 22, 2016

Reviewed by Lynn Harvey.
(Read more of Lynn's reviews for Euro Crime here.)

Although it had been decades since he had last seen the girl, the memories of that night had never quite left him, the sound of her stressed breathing gulping at the hood, and the frail thump of her fists battering the car window as they drove her away...

Border Country, Northern Ireland, late winter.
Samuel Reid has felt a growing sense of foreboding for months. This anxiety brings with it vivid dreams which keep him sleepless. His fears become more concrete when travellers set up camp in a field bordering his farm. The site grows larger and more chaotic. It obsesses Reid along with the idea that the travellers are smuggling tobacco across the border. He contacts the local authorities but the travellers own the land and there are no grounds for their eviction. One night, a man emerges from the shadows of Reid’s farmyard. He says he is a journalist and asks Reid about a young traveller woman who had been working at some of the local farms during the mid-1970s when she disappeared. He shows Reid a photograph of her holding a baby and another of a group of young men in uniform. The uniforms are the same as the one hanging in Reid’s own wardrobe and amongst the young men in the photograph stands Reid’s own brother. Angry, Reid pushes the journalist out, spotting a traveller van at the entrance to his yard as he does so. The van flashes its lights. The journalist leaves with a vague threat and heads towards the van.
Inspector Celcius Daly is under investigation at work for his possible involvement in the disappearance of an old spy during his last investigation. The case concerned a notorious Murder Triangle of the 1970s and it left its mark on Daly for another reason – it had included the murder of his own mother. A solitary and isolated man, Daly is currently excluded still further, left swinging his heels on court duty which means standing in for detectives unable to attend proceedings. During one courthouse session his isolation is broken by a woman solicitor who asks for his help. Celcius is nonplussed to find she simply wants him to hold her client’s baby whilst they attend a hearing but he goes ahead and does so. However the next time that this same young solicitor asks Daly for his help is different. Her ten-year-old son has disappeared from her car whilst she delivered some papers to the court. Daly steps in to organise a search and collect potential witness statements. Gradually it appears as though the boy may have gone with his abductors willingly. Why? Who are they? And if he went willingly – where is he now?

In his Celcius Daly crime novels, Tyrone-born Quinn stakes out two landscapes. The first is that of the dilapidated fields, cottages and blackthorn hedges of rural Northern Ireland full of falling rain and winding tracks which disappear into the darkness of forest and bog-land. His second “landscape” is that of the human ghosts and tragedies behind certain deaths and disappearances in such isolated rural communities. TRESPASS is his fourth Daly novel and it opens with the seemingly contemporary theme of child abduction. But it carries a parallel mystery: the disappearance of a young traveller woman decades before. In investigating both mysteries, Quinn is drawn into the lives and fates of Traveller people both now and during the political disturbances of the Troubles; Daly the outsider is drawn into the lives of these other Outsiders.

In the beginning Quinn’s characteristically atmospheric writing almost steals the pace of his story as he writes about Daly himself, his cross-roads isolation, his life at work and at his run-down cottage on the shores of Lough Neagh. But I am quibbling. Because such atmospheric writing also builds suspense and menace in a way that catches me up and has me reluctant to turn the page but sure to do so. And my reluctance is not the dread of brutal violence but a dread of supernatural horror which Quinn brings to his version of Emerald Noir. Once the way of the world and its crime plot is established, Quinn speeds up the pace to such an extent that I chase on through, the straightforwardness of the ending taking me by surprise and leaving me asking questions about the characters that only another book can answer – if it does.

I have enjoyed all of Quinn’s Celcius Daly books, including TRESPASS. Raymond Chandler wrote a famous sentence about the mean streets and the investigator. Well, Daly may not walk down “mean streets” exactly but he is certainly an “unusual” man and a man of “honor”. Long may he and his Gothic setting survive.

Something rather different from Charles Den Tex, long-listed last year with his first book in English for the CWA’s New Blood Award (ironically, in the Netherlands, his home country, he has been published since 1995). Now, together with his wife Anneloes Timmerije, a journalist and an award-winning writer of literary fiction and historical non-fiction, they have fashioned something beyond the boundaries of the books normally reviewed on this site.

It is however an excellent book, and I would hate to see it slip unreviewed between categories, and end up neglected.

For it is first and foremost a love story, a true story (its original Dutch title translated as ‘a forgotten story of an unwavering love in wartime’) between Guus Havers, a pilot based in Java in the Dutch East Indies, and his wife Lienke. Guus is inadvertently parted from his wife in the early stages of the Japanese war in the Pacific. A highly regarded pilot, Guus has just transported to Australia a 43-man Army detachment, a group that is planned to lead a later counter-offensive. In his absence, an unexpectedly early attack on Java succeeds in taking over the island. Evacuations are attempted but Lienke fails to gain one of the coveted places. They will remain parted, knowing little or nothing of each other’s circumstances, their longing for each other most movingly portrayed, until the war ends and Guus can finally search for her properly.

But it is not simply a love story. Based mainly on Guus’s war-time diaries, it is also a dramatic record of an arena in World War II of which, like me, you may have little knowledge. In Australia the frustrations pile up for Guus: the slowness and inefficiency of the Allied response, the lack of the necessary aircraft (in particular the cherished B-25s), the rivalries amongst the pilots, the boredom. An early exception (crime writer becoming evident?), a mission back into the combat zone, with a mysterious ‘valuable’ package that goes missing. A little obvious, I thought, but then it turns out (historian also coming to the fore) to be one of three other key elements in the book, throwing light on real-life murky manoeuvrings, one a gross miscarriage of justice, in the war-time history of the area. Guus, for instance, is manipulated to spy for one side in what will turn out to be a political struggle for power in the post-occupation period. In Java meanwhile we experience, through Lienke, the subjugation of the civilian population, later the internment of Dutch and mixed marriage families, and the increasing deprivation within the camps as the war proceeds.

All this is conveyed in crystal-clear often moving prose, flawlessly translated in my view by Brian Doyle-Du Breuil.

Our authors however have reserved their greatest coup for the last part of the novel, bringing the story up to 1995. A new (unidentified) first-person narrative voice is introduced, interviewing the surviving Lienke, now known as Linda and living in California. Like Robert Wilson’s standalone novel, The Company of Strangers, (though without that book’s all-encompassing and complex spy plot) these later heart-rending chapters suggest that another subject of FINDING HER is what Wilson calls the ’big lives’ of his parents' generation (and dare I suggest, those of both Den Tex and Timmerije?).

And it comes with a stunning and poignant last line revelation. Just like a great crime novel.
And if you find any of this review intriguing, take a look at this, another eye-witness account, forceful and moving.

Friday, December 16, 2016

I've updated the main files on the Euro Crime website today. Euro Crime includes both British and other European crime fiction writers (that have been published in English); non-British/European born crime writers who are strongly associated with British/European crime fiction (eg. Donna Leon), and crime writers in translation from outside of Europe.

1. The main by month/by author pages refer to when a book is published (in English) anywhere in the world however the 'by category ie historical, translated etc' is specific to the UK eg Rhys Bowen's Molly Murphy series which was published in the US in the 2000s (and on) is only recently published in the UK and so some of her books appear in the 2016 Historical list.*

2. When a book is released "early" in ebook I am taking the publication date as to be when the print edition comes out (this is the rule we use for determining Petrona Award eligibility).

Sunday, December 11, 2016

It's time to consider the titles eligible for the 2017 CWA International Dagger.

Here's the list of translated crime novels published between 1 April 2016 and 31 March 2017 ie the period of eligibility. There's 100* so far.

For ease of purchase/library reservation here they are listed by UK month of publication:

In addition to the list I have set up a Good Reads widget on the right-hand side of the blog. This allows the covers to be visible plus you can add them to your wish-list on Good Reads. Should you wish to, you can subscribe to this list through RSS. I've used the original cover if the English one isn't on Good Reads yet.

In the list below I've also included the country of birth and gender of the author(s) plus the translator's name (where I can find it) and the publisher.

*this total includes titles published by AmazonCrossing. I am not sure if these count as UK publications however I imagine people interested in this list will also be interested in these books. The CWA website has the list of official submissions

Wednesday, December 07, 2016

Reviewed by Susan White.
(Read more of Susan's reviews for Euro Crime here.)

This is the second book in the series featuring Captain Damian Seeker, a soldier in the army of Oliver Cromwell, newly appointed the Protector of England.

One of the spies in the employ of Oliver Cromwell's secret service has been found dressed as a Black Friar and walled up - alive - in a church. Seeker is tasked with solving his murder and also finding the sensitive information he was tracking. Seeker is well known in London for his uncompromising belief in Oliver Cromwell and he is feared for his relentless searching out of Royalists and other enemies of the new State.

There is concern that someone in the department is working against the Protectorate, so Thurlow, Seeker's superior, asks him to search out the truth quietly and discretely. One of the suspects is Lady Winter, a known Royalist, who coincidently asks Seeker's help in finding a young servant girl, Charity, who has disappeared. Seeker discovers that Charity is not the only young and attractive person who has recently disappeared. He finds that both the Royalist factions and former Cromwell supporters who believe that his reforms have not gone far enough are plotting against the Protectorate and his investigations of the murdered spy and the missing young people start to have strands in common.

I really enjoyed this book. It is an interesting period of English history and one I knew only the basics about. I found that the background given about Cromwell's followers, who felt he was too tolerant and wanted to bring him down and impose a much more fervent religious belief system on the country, seemed particularly relevant today.

For anyone who enjoys reading historical crime - particularly the C J Sansom series featuring Shardlake - I am sure they will enjoy this. There is the same depth of knowledge of period through the book which gives the right level of historical background without slowing the story down.

Monday, December 05, 2016

The latest monthly challenge over at Past Offences is to read a book in December, published in 1960. Here are some British/European crime titles to choose from, first published in English in 1960, pulled from my database. This information is correct to the best of my knowledge however please do double check dates before spending any cash!:

Sunday, December 04, 2016

Here's a snapshot of what I think is published for the first time in December 2016 (and is usually a UK date but occasionally will be a US or Australian date). December and future months (and years) can be found on the Future Releases page. If I've missed anything do please leave a comment.